Devotionary

Getting along with others is not easy, even in the best of times. Families where love for one another is a high priority can still find themselves struggling with unity and battling over things like rights and personal preferences. In Acts 15:22-41, we are going to see that conflicts and disunity were a constant problem in the early church. The increasingly diverse makeup of the growing church was creating natural tensions and disagreements. Debates were becoming increasingly more common, even among the leadership. But through it all, there was a strong desire on the part of the apostles to maintain a spirit of unity in the midst of all the diversity. That is exactly what Jesus had prayed would happen. The members of the church in the first-century were under a great deal of pressure. They faced ongoing and increasing opposition from the Jews as well as the pagans. Their presence in the community was seen as a threat to existing religions and even to the social fabric of the society. Christianity was disrupti

Things were moving at a rapid pace for the early church. God was doing incredible things and the Spirit of God was moving mightily, not only in Jerusalem, but around the world. And all this change was causing consternation for many in the church, especially those Jews who felt that Christianity was an extension of their Jewish faith. They could not fathom a religion that was anything but Jewish at its core, with circumcision and the Mosaic law as central tenets and non-negotiable requirements. But in Acts 15:12-21, Luke records the testimonies of Paul and Barnabas as they reported their efforts among the Gentiles. But their real focus was on what God had been doing. What had taken place among the Gentiles had clearly been the work of God, and not the result of men’s efforts. And what they had to say was going to have a dramatic impact on those who heard them, because it became clear that God was doing a new and different thing among them. Who were they to dictate to God the rules by which He was going to rede

Internal conflict. It can happen in a marriage, a business, a home, or even in a church. And it seemed to be a regular presence in the growing body of Christ during the first century. As if all the external opposition wasn’t enough, the new church found itself dealing with an intense and potentially divisive debate over the heart and soul of the apostles’ ministry given to them by Jesus: The gospel. As the news regarding Jesus’ offer of salvation began to spread outside the borders of Judea and Judaism, it raised some critical concerns among those who had been the first to accept the gospel message: The Jews. If you recall, the 120 individuals who had been in the upper room on the day of Pentecost had all been Jews. They had also been believers in Jesus Christ. Jesus had restricted His ministry to the land of the Jews. He never ventured outside of Judea. And, for the most part, his audiences were made up primarily of Jews. He did have interactions with non-Jews such as the Samaritan woman, but they were rare.

One minute, Paul and Barnabas were being treated like gods. The next thing they knew, they were being treated like dangerous criminals, with Paul even having to experience being stoned nearly to death. But the ups and downs of ministry didn’t seem to faze Paul or Barnabas. They seemed to know that it came with the territory. It was part of their job descriptions as ambassadors for Christ. For these two men, the real issue was that they had been trusted with the task of bringing the good news of Jesus Christ to the Gentile world. And they knew that God had opened up a door of faith to these people, because they had watched as countless numbers of them were streaming through the narrow gate and walking the path that led to righteousness. The way of Christ. And Jesus had warned that His way was not going to be the easy or the popular way. “You can enter God’s Kingdom only through the narrow gate. The highway to hell is broad, and its gate is wide for the many who choose that way. But the gateway to life is very

In Acts 14:8-18, Paul and Barnabas have a seemingly chance encounter with a man who was born with some kind of physical abnormality that had left him unable to walk. He was in the crowd who had gathered to hear Paul and Barnabas speak. Most likely, he had to have been carried there by friends or family members. Or perhaps he dragged himself along, using his arms as his only means of locomotion. This scene takes place in the Gentile city of Lystra, a pagan city where the Greek gods were worshiped and idolized. Upon seeing this man in the crowd, Paul saw an opportunity to perform a sign. But first, he saw that this man had faith, enough faith to be healed. We’re not sure exactly what Paul saw or how he saw it, but he was confident that this man’s faith was strong enough to result in his healing. What happened next left the man transformed and the crowd amazed. So much so, that they attributed the miracle they had just witnessed to the work of the gods ­– their gods. They explained what they had witnessed by dec

As we begin Acts 14, the first seven verses will reveal Paul and Barnabas ministering in the synagogue in Iconium. They would experience remarkable success in their efforts among the Jews and Greeks, seeing many come to faith in Christ. But they would also encounter more resistance, with some of the Jews doing everything in their power to turn the people against Paul and Barnabas. The end result was that the city became divided, with some siding with Paul and Barnabas, while others chose to join the Jews in their resistance of the gospel. But the real question is, why did some believe while others refused? What was it that caused some of the Jews and Gentiles to hear the message of Paul and Barnabas, accept it and receive Jesus Christ as their Savior? And yet, many others heard the very same message and ended up trying to stone the men who delivered it. It was the same message delivered by the same two individuals. So, what made the difference? What was the deciding factor that led to the conversion of some a

Over the centuries, millions upon millions of people have rejected the offer of salvation from sin offered through Jesus Christ. They heard the message, but deemed it untenable or unnecessary. People from all walks of life and from virtually every nation in the world have chosen to reject Jesus. They preferred the darkness over the light. They found more satisfaction and comfort in what they know, what was familiar to them, than in that which they couldn’t fully understand or explain. In Acts 13:42-52, we will see Paul and Barnabas running into just such a group of people. In this case, they were Jews who chose to reject and contradict the words of Paul and Barnabas, refusing to believe what they had to say. And as a result, Paul accused them of being unworthy of eternal life. Paul was not indicating that eternal life has to be earned or deserved in some way. He was simply indicating that their stubborn refusal to accept the message of salvation made possible through faith in Jesus Christ kept them in a state

What do you think Paul would have to say to a synagogue full of Jews living in a foreign country, far from the land of Israel? Well, thanks to Luke, we don’t have to guess. He provides us with the details of just such a sermon, delivered by Paul in the synagogue in Pisidian Antioch. And he takes a note from the apostle Peter’s play book, mirroring the content he used when he had spoken before the high priest and the Jewish Sanhedrin. Paul basically gives a history lecture, but with a very specific objective. He is trying to get them to understand that all of Jewish history pointed to Jesus as the Messiah or Christ. God had led them out of captivity in Egypt, back to the land of Canaan, the land promised to Abraham – but for a much greater reason than just their occupation of it and infatuation with it. God had given the people of Israel judges and then kings, including King David, but they were meant to hold the nation together, until such a time that God would send His Son. Paul’s whole objective was to get

What happens when godly leaders, compelled by the Spirit of God, send out godly men to do the work of God? Incredible things. That is what we see happen in Acts 13:1-12. Saul, better known to us as Paul, gets tag-teamed with his friend Barnabas, and sent out on the first of three missionary journeys that he will take. These two were called by God, but commissioned and sent out by the leadership of the local church in Antioch. There was a clear sense of calling on these two men’s lives and a unified consensus among the local leadership that they should be sent, even if it ended up negatively impacting the church in Antioch. And in this section of verses, we are going to see God continue to redirect the efforts of the church, driving them further and further away from the central hub of Judaism, the city of Jerusalem, and into the world dominated by Gentiles. The very first convert Paul and Barnabas will have the joy of seeing will be a Roman government official. And we will see this Gentile radically juxtapose

Many of the stories found in the Book of Acts are fantastic in nature. They involve supernatural events and the divine intervention of God in the everyday affairs of men. Then, there are stories that are somewhat humorous in nature. They provide us with reminders that all of these events were taking place among flesh-and-blood human beings, just like us. Sometimes the people involved failed to see the hand of God and ended up drawing some rather interesting conclusions. When the crowds had heard the disciples speaking in tongues on the day of Pentecost, they wrote it off as nothing more than a case of public intoxication – en masse. In today’s episode, found in Acts 12:12-25, we have yet another comedic take on the affairs of the disciples. It involves Peter, and immediately follows his miraculous release from prison by God. He ends up at the home of Mary, but is denied entrance, because the disciples gathered inside, ostensibly praying for his release, refuse to believe it’s really him. They leave poor Peter

The Book of Acts is filled with stories of all kinds, from miraculous, never-before-seen events that boggle the mind and stretch the limits of our beliefs, to extremely dark and sinister scenes where the darkness of man’s heart becomes too readily apparent. We have seen Stephen martyred and the disciples flogged. We have heard of Saul’s pre-conversion efforts to eradicate the church by arresting and executing Christians. And now, in Acts 12:1-11, we read of Herod’s beheading of the apostle John, the brother of James. Too say that things were heating up would be a gross understatement. The church was coming under increasing attack as the enemy intensified his efforts to eradicate the followers of Jesus and put to an end any hopes of the gospel of ever reaching the ends of the earth. This was war, spiritual war, but the casualties were more than spiritual in nature. There were people dying for their faith. Peter would end up, once again, imprisoned for being a follower of Jesus and a messenger of the gospel. Bu

So far, we’ve seen Peter and John get arrested and flogged, Ananias and Sapphira be struck dead, Stephen end up stoned to death, and the church get scattered because of intensified persecution. Now, we’re going to hear about a famine in the land. Not exactly a walk in the park. But through it all, we have also seen God’s hand at work, spreading the gospel and growing His church. It’s so easy to look at the less-than-pleasant circumstances of life and assume that God is nowhere to be seen. We can not only doubt His presence, but question His love and care for us. But if there is one consistent theme in the Book of Acts, it is that God is at work, all the time and in every situation, no matter how grim or unpleasant they may appear. In Acts 11:19-30, we are going to see the method to God’s seeming madness as He introduces His chosen instrument, Saul, to the city of Antioch. God had divinely orchestrated the friendship between Barnabas and Saul some years earlier and neither knew what He had in store for them in

Have you ever purposefully made a decision to stand in God’s way? Probably not. Most people in their right mind and who have even a rudimentary idea of who God is, would think twice before standing up to Him. Or would they? The truth is, we all do it. Not in a shake-your-fist-in-the-face-of-God kind of way, but in our own subtle version of correcting God when we think He’s failed to do what we were expecting. In Acts 11:4-18, Paul is going to share his own personal version of all that had happened in Caesarea. He’s going to recount everything from his disturbing vision and the visit of the three men sent by Cornelius, to his sharing of the gospel and the coming of the Holy Spirit upon those who were in the house. And Peter makes it fairly clear that he had not been willing to oppose what God had been doing. He had no right to stand against what God had decided to do. After all, God was in charge, not Peter. Yet, the crowd to whom Peter was telling this story was made up of some Jewish Christians who were havi

If there’s one thing most of us as believers have learned, it’s that God doesn’t always do things the way we expect or want. He seems to have a mind of His own and a tendency to do things the way He thinks best, whether we approve or not. And in Acts 10:44-11:3, we are going to see God surprising Peter and the Jewish believers in the church with His treatment of the Gentiles who came to faith in the home of Cornelius. God poured out His Spirit. Upon their belief in the saving work of Jesus Christ, each of the Gentiles received the same anointing of the Spirit of God as the 120 disciples had received on the day of Pentecost. They even spoke in foreign languages. This had not been what Peter had expected and, as we will see, it was most certainly not what the Jewish believers back in Jerusalem had anticipated. God was not doing things according to their preconceived notions of protocol. These Gentiles were received the baptism of the Spirit, as well as water baptism, and they hadn’t even been required to be cir

Today, we’re covering a longer-than-normal section of Scripture: Acts 1017-43. It involves the sequence of events that followed Peter’s rather bizarre vision of the sheet filled with unclean animals. Now, God is going to provide Peter with a real-life application of what that vision had meant. Peter is invited to the home of Cornelius in Caesarea, where he will be given an opportunity to treat that which he had long held in disdain: Gentiles, with respect, and extend to them the gospel of Jesus Christ. God was opening the doors to the unclean and the unworthy. But those descriptions were not to be reserved for just Gentiles. The truth of the matter was that all men and women stand before God as unclean and unworthy. All our best deeds done with the best of intentions are nothing but filthy rags in God’s eyes. A right standing with God is not based on human effort or any form of earned merit. God had extended His grace to Peter and the rest of the apostles. Now He was going to extend it to Cornelius and his ho

Everybody has an opinion. It’s human nature. Even when it comes to spiritual matters. And Peter was no different. In today episode, based on Acts 10:1-16, we have an interesting tale of two visions. One is given to a Roman names Cornelius. The other is given to Peter. And they both came from God Himself. The purpose of these two visions was to prepare Peter and the other apostles for a major shift in outreach that God was about to bring about. Until this point in the story, the furthest the gospel had spread outside the environs of Jerusalem and beyond the ethnic borders of Judaism, had been to Samaria. The people there were actually part-Jewish and worshipers of Yahweh. But other than Hellenistic or Greek-speaking Jews who had come to faith in Jesus, there were really no purely Gentile members of the newly founded church of Jesus Christ. But all that was about to change. God was preparing to open up the door to let the gospel out and the Gentiles in. But first he had to prepare one of the leading apostles in

Rise and walk. Be healed. Take up your bed and walk. Over and over again in the Book of Acts, we encounter these scenes where spectacular things are taking place. Miracles are being performed. Blind people are receiving their eyesight back. People who’ve never been able to walk are suddenly given the capacity to walk, run, and dance. The blind receive their sight. The sick are made well. Those who are demon-possessed are set free. But as incredible as each and every one of these stories may be, they pale in comparison to the spiritual healing so many people received at the hands of the apostles. And it’s likely that Luke has not provided us with an exhaustive list of miraculous healings. There were probably others that we don’t know about. And there were most likely many people who never received healing. They went away unchanged, having never met the disciples face-to-face. The thing we have to realize is that the miracles of healing performed by the disciples were meant to validate their ministries. Their a

Luke appears to be a matter-of-fact, no-nonsense, cut-to-the-chase kind of a guy. In chronicling the history of the early church, he provides us with a tremendous amount of details, from its rather bizarre beginnings in that upper room in Jerusalem to its eventual spread to the ends of the earth. But Luke doesn’t include everything. At times, he seems to purposefully leave out some details that he deems unnecessary or superfluous. And today, we’re going to look at one such case. In Acts 9:26-31, Luke appears to have Saul going straight from Damascus to Jerusalem, where he would interface with the apostles. But we know from Saul’s own accounts of that period of his life, there was a significant time gap between his encounter with the risen Jesus on the road to Damascus and his eventual visit to Jerusalem. By pieicing together the timeline of events, we get a better understanding of what God was doing to prepare Saul for the task assigned to him by Jesus. There was a period of preparation necessary. While Saul

We love stories of life change. As long as their positive. And there is no story quite like that of Saul of Tarsus, the persecutor of the Christian faith turned proclaimer of the good news of Jesus Christ. In Acts 9:19-25, Luke continues his account of Saul’s dramatic conversion story, providing Theophilus, the one to whom the Book of Acts was originally written, with a synopsis of this man’s incredible encounter with the risen Christ and all that happened afterwards. But we have to supplement Luke’s more abbreviated version of the story with input from Saul himself, provided many years later. It seems that Saul, better known to us as Paul, never tired of recalling and retelling his dramatic salvation story, because it was a constant reminder to him of the grace, mercy and sovereignty of God. Paul knew better than anyone else just how radical the transformation in his life had been. He knew he had been damaged goods and completely undeserving of God’s grace. In fact, he would say that, when it came to sinners

The conversion of Saul of Tarsus. It’s a relatively well-known story among Christians. After all, it’s not every day that you hear about a man whose full-time job was that of a bounty hunter, rounding up Christians and sentencing them to either prison or death. And this man suddenly gets transformed into one of the greatest evangelists for the Christian faith the world has ever known. We love the story of Paul because it is an undeniable picture of God’s amazing grace and unquestionable sovereignty over everything and everyone. In Acts 9:10-19, Luke provides us with the details of what happened after Saul was struck blind by the resurrected Christ somewhere along the road to Damascus. God arranged for a disciple named Ananias to meet Saul in Damascus and not only restore his sight, but play a part in God’s commissioning of Saul as His servant. This is a fantastic story filled with incredible plot twists and plenty of head-scratching decisions made by God. It is difficult to hear of Saul’s conversion and not w